Seeing your name, my heart hasn't risen and fallen like that in long enough that I'd forgotten how jarring the sensation was.
Your name. The word that means you.
I hate you for making it hurt.
I love you for being what you are, every bit.
I miss you with a force that could wring tears from me at any moment of any day,
No matter how long I wait or how hard I try to distance myself from this.
I'm in it.
No, it's in me, and it could be a disease.
A disease of the blood that reaches every cell of me and compresses them one by one,
A vice,
A venom.

I see my death in those letters. Your name.
I see the way I'll be unmade someday,
Maybe not by you, maybe not by that word,
But by someone.
By the word that means someone, who will be the last girl I can love without crumbling.
It was written in stone the day I took my first breath.
The only thing I can't beat- love, will beat me.

This certainty is part of what steals my breath when I look at you, because I'm afraid to die, I am.
But I am more afraid not to feel what I feel in your arms.
Kissing you is my choice to face the suffering you might inflict,
It is me taking the biggest risk of my life, each time, because I love you, I do.
I love you madly.
I love you horribly.
I love you with a kind of chaos that reminds me constantly that it
Will win someday,
And expand beyond me,
And burst my heart and I will end.
I'll be over, because it will finally have consumed everything of me that breathes.

I meet it every day with the sunrise, and it need say nothing but that one word-
Your name-
To skewer my heart with joy so intense it becomes pain,
And longing so achingly empty it knocks my breath from me.
I see you in my dreams, still.
I've begun to try and wash you out of my soul, but it will never work until I want to do it,
And I will never want to do it,
And it will END ME.
Don't you understand that as afraid as you are that we might love one another, I am more afraid?
Don't you understand that I put my life on the line
Every
****
Day I refuse to stop saying your name?
Because I don't do it lightly.
I don't give lightly. I don't love lightly.
And you turn from me, not because you don't care, not because you don't understand, not because you don't want me,
But because you do.
And you are a fool, my love! You are a fool and it may very well be the end of me, and...
Couldn't you kiss me, and let me end with a smile?